On Beauty

Zadie Smith's "On Beauty" is a funny, powerful and moving story about love and family. Why do we fall in love with the people we do? Why do we visit our mistakes on our children? What makes life truly beautiful? Set in New England mainly and London partly, "On Beauty" concerns a pair of feuding families - the Belseys and the Kipps - and a clutch of doomed affairs. It puts low morals among high ideals and asks some searching questions about what life does to love. For the Belseys and the Kipps, the confusions - both personal and political - of our uncertain age are about to be brought close to home: right to the heart of family. "The novel I didn't want to finish, I was enjoying it so much". (John Sutherland, "Evening Standard"). "Thrums with intellectual sass and know-how". ("Literary Review"). "Delightfully entertaining ... filled with humour, generosity and contemporary sparkle". (Alex Clark, "Daily Telegraph"). "My novel of the year ... Delicious". (Liz Jones, "Evening Standard"). "Satirical, wise and sexy". ("Washington Post"). "Heartstopping". ("The Times Literary Supplement"). "A triumph, Smith's comedy shines". ("Daily Mail"). "Ambitious, hugely impressive, beautifully observed". ("Guardian"). Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975. Her debut novel, "White Teeth", won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Writers' First Book Prize, and was included in TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. Her second novel, "On Beauty", was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction. She has written two further novels, "The Autograph Man" and "NW", a collection of essays, "Changing My Mind", and also edited a short-story anthology, "The Book of Other People".